Most conditional cash transfer programmes around the world target women as the recipients of transfers as a means of empowering them and promoting gender equality. However, the mechanisms at work are poorly understood and empowerment is not well defined or measured. This column discusses a new measure of female empowerment in the household within the context of a national cash transfer programme in Macedonia. Whereas conventional survey questions about power and decision-making don’t reveal any empowerment effects of the programme, this new measure reveals a positive effect.

How should the international community deal with the solvency crisis of a systemic country? This column argues that the presence of spillovers calls for reducing bail-ins, while requiring somewhat greater fiscal adjustment by the crisis country. To avoid excessive fiscal consolidation, the international community should also provide highly systemic countries with official transfers. To contain moral hazard, it is important to use transfers only when spillovers are particularly severe.

Dyadic social network data – describing relations between two actors – are frequently derived from self-reporting surveys. This column explores how the misreporting problems that are typical of such data can bias estimations. Data on transfers between households in a Tanzanian village are shown to display a high rate of discrepancies within dyads. Failure to account for such misreporting results in a sizeable underestimation of inter-household transfers.